In Galway Kinnell’s “Strong is Your Hold” his poems rejected the idea of seeking fulfillment by escaping into the imaginary world, and instead has his characters inhabiting perfectly tangible worlds. People and nature are always first and foremost present with an aesthetic unique to the romantic writers of the past.

For example, in “The Stone Table” he describes sitting with his love on a hillside, their feet on the edge of a stone slab once the floor of a cow pass. He wrote:

From here we can see the blackberry thicket,
the maple sapling the moose slashed
with his cutting teeth, turning it
scarlet too early, the bluebird boxes
flown from now, the one tree left
of the ancient orchard popped out
all over with saffron and rosy,
subacid pie apples, smaller crabs grafted
with scions of old varieties

Here, we can see him writing connections between people and their environments. The pretty, tasty things we do not mind getting in our way. The sticky and sweet that comes out of aggressive actions. Being taken too early or seeing that happen. And standing alone as a tree, yet surrounded by all kinds of everything, but not anything that could understand the plight of a tree.

His poems are testaments to the significant possibilities for transcendent realization that can be induced by meticulous excavation of the physical universe, and even beauty can be something as intangible as the little life lessons along the way.
Furthermore, the over justification of nouns, but not proper nouns, sets up a there of the how environments shape people for better of for worse. We see this in “Feathering,” a poem if a woman sort of existing through life. Kinnell wrote:

Yesterday she took down from the attic
An old lumpy tea-colored pillow—stained
With drool, hair grease, night sweats or what!
which many heads have waked upon
in the dark, and lain there motionless, eyes open,
wondering at the strangeness within them selves

Here we see her sense of sort of obscured by her surroundings and the verbose characterizations of them. She is always and only as she. However, things like pillows, in terms of language, are allowed to have a color, a texture, and proof of being touched by other people. This pillow had waked up with people. We are never told of a child or other who had maybe risen to the she. This pillow had even changed lives, having had people wake up with wonder. But there is quietness, modesty to the she, one that doesn’t force sympathy. Even though she is only a she, there is a tone that she does not feel the need for frills and is humbled by only being a she.
The allure of his language is that he speaks with a homogeneous feel of home. In “Everyone Was in Love” we get an unfettered glimpse into his home and children—which recalls the delight of seeing Maud and Fergus in the doorway, a dozen garter snakes draped over them like brand-new clothing. Kinnell wrote they, “were deliciously pleased with themselves./The snakes seemed to be tickled, too./We were enchanted. Everyone was in love.” There are two ideas of home here. For one, there is a deeper attachment to home as a child because there are fewer placed of residence, as well as the main reason for a house is because there will be inhabitants who will not enjoy the uncomforts of, say, an apartment. Secondly, by using snakes, there is this kicked-out-of-Paradise-and-I-don’t-give-a-fuck feel to it. There are two naked bodied draped in snakes, which seem to enjoy this allusion of displacement. You see, in this poem one of the snakes had eaten a frog’s green webbed hind foot. That’s what seems to be the displacement. Being in a snakes mouth atone moment and elsewhere at another (because things can live without our legs). However, people cannot not function all to well when there love is in the mouth of the displacer and yonder elsewhere.
It is almost as if the words are imitations of something else, maybe shapes of reality. In “It All Comes Back” he plays with form. It’s about an incident in which his four-year-old son became so angry with him—for laughing at him—that he hooked his thumbs into his father’s mouth and yanked hard on his cheeks. At risk of embarrassing him, Kinnell wrote:

Let him decide. Here are the three choices.
He can scratch his slapdash check mark,
which makes me think of the rakish hook
of his old high school hockey stick,
in whichever box applies:

     Tear it up.
     Don’t publish it but give me a copy.
     OK, publish it, on the chance that somewhere someone
survives of all those said to die miserably every day for lack
of the small clarifications sometimes found in poems.

Here form placates function in the sense that in a poem about someone, there should be an urgency to it, and he does so by addressing his son directly. But, just like in typically playful familial relationships, sometimes for shits and giggles people ignore their requests; and here we see the poem being published with no checkmarks in the boxes.

In “Pulling a Nail” we are rekindled with Kinnell’s love of pigs. I don’t care why he always writes about them, I just hope he never stops. It is about pulling a nail. Kinnell makes it into a contest between a son and his dead father who drove the nail. It’s a rather amazing poem, comparing the nail’s resistance to “an old pig who hears/the slaughterer’s truck pull up/and rasp open its gate and rattle/its ramp into place, and grunts.” He has a way of taking a pejorative word, makes you want to get to know it, and see something there that wasn’t there before (like in Beauty and The Beast during the snowball fight). The pig takes on the grotesque amidst a group of instantly, aesthetically appealing. It’s like, since the pig’s beauty takes time and work, there is a sort of wisdom in the pig’s death: him hearing the slaughterer’s truck and accepting his fate.